The Standardization of American Schooling: Linking Secondary and Higher Education, 1870–1910

233 Pages·2008·1.601 MB·English

by  Marc A. VanOverbeke (auth.)

The Standardization of American Schooling
SECONDARY EDUCATION IN A CHANGING WORLD
Series editors: Barry M. Franklin and Gary McCulloch
Published by Palgrave Macmillan:
The Comprehensive Public High School: Historical Perspectives
By Geoffrey Sherington and Craig Campbell
(2006)
Cyril Norwood and the Ideal of Secondary Education
By Gary McCulloch
(2007)
The Death of the Comprehensive High School?:
Historical, Contemporary, and Comparative Perspectives
Edited by Barry M. Franklin and Gary McCulloch
(2007)
The Emergence of Holocaust Education in American Schools
By Thomas D. Fallace
(2008)
The Standardization of American Schooling:
Linking Secondary and Higher Education, 1870–1910
By Marc A. VanOverbeke
(2008)
The Standardization of
American Schooling
Linking Secondary and Higher
Education, 1870–1910
M A. V O
ARC AN VERBEKE
THE STANDARDIZATION OF AMERICAN SCHOOLING
Copyright © Marc A. VanOverbeke, 2008.
Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 2008 978-0-230-60628-9
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any
manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief
quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews.
First published in 2008 by
PALGRAVE MACMILLAN™
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Companies and representatives throughout the world.
PALGRAVE MACMILLAN is the global academic imprint of the Palgrave
Macmillan division of St. Martin’s Press, LLC and of Palgrave Macmillan Ltd.
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Union and other countries.
ISBN 978-1-349-37356-7 ISBN 978-0-230-61259-4 (eBook)
DOI 10.1057/9780230612594
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
VanOverbeke, Marc A.
The standardization of American schooling : linking secondary and
higher education, 1870–1910 / by Marc A. VanOverbeke.
p. cm.—(Secondary education in a changing world series)
1. Education, Secondary—Aims and objectives—United States—
History. 2. Education, Higher—United States—History.
3. Educational change—United States—History. I. Title.
LA222.V363 2008
373.9309—dc22 2007041091
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Design by Newgen Imaging Systems (P) Ltd., Chennai, India.
First edition: June 2008
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
To My Family
Contents
Series Editors’ Preface ix
Acknowledgments xiii
Introduction 1
1 Changing Expectations for American Education 9
2 Building the University of Michigan on a
High School Foundation 35
3 Michigan Launches a Movement for
Regional Accreditation 59
4 The Secondary Schools’ Challenge to
Higher Education and the Dominance
of the Modern Subjects 91
5 Charles W. Eliot and the Early Campaign for a
National Educational System 115
6 Regional Efforts and a Renewed Focus on
National Reform 143
Epilogue: Looking Ahead by Looking to the Past 171
Notes 179
Index 215
Series Editors’ Preface
Among the educational issues affecting policymakers, public officials, and
citizens in modern, democratic, and industrial societies, none has been
more contentious than the role of secondary schooling. In establishing the
Secondary Education in a Changing World series with Palgrave Macmillan,
the intent is to provide a venue for scholars in different national settings to
explore critical and controversial issues surrounding secondary education.
The series will be a place for the airing and, hopefully, resolution of these
controversial issues.
More than a century has elapsed since Emile Durkheim argued the
importance of studying secondary education as a unity, rather than in rela-
tion to the wide range of subjects and the division of pedagogical labor of
which it was composed. Only thus, he insisted, would it be possible to have
the ends and aims of secondary education constantly in view. The failure
to do so accounted for a great deal of the difficulty with which secondary
education was faced. First, it meant that secondary education was “intel-
lectually disorientated,” between “a past which is dying and a future which
is still undecided,” and as a result “lacks the vigor and vitality which it once
possessed.” Second, the institutions of secondary education were not
understood adequately in relation to their past, which was “the soil which
nourished them and gave them their present meaning, and apart from
which they cannot be examined without a great deal of impoverishment
and distortion.” And third, it was difficult for secondary school teachers
who were responsible for putting policy reforms into practice to under-
stand the nature of the problems and issues that prompted them.1
In the early years of the twenty-first century, Durkheim’s strictures still
have resonance. The intellectual disorientation of secondary education is
more evident than ever as it is caught up in successive waves of policy
changes. The connections between the present and the past have become
increasingly hard to trace and untangle. Moreover, the distance between
policymakers on the one hand and practitioners on the other has rarely
seemed as immense as it is today. The key mission of the current series of
x Series Editors’ Preface
books is, in the spirit of Durkheim, to address these underlying dilemmas
of secondary education and to play a part in resolving them.
The Standardization of American Schooling is Marc VanOverbeke’s
account of the efforts of a host of late-nineteenth and early-twentieth-
century educational reformers, including university presidents, professors,
secondary school administrators, and teachers, to develop a system of
accreditation to connect the work of the secondary school with that of the
university. The key players in his story are University of Michigan presi-
dent James B. Angell and Harvard University president Charles W. Eliot.
Focusing largely but not exclusively on events at the University of Michigan,
VanOverbeke examines the development of this system and its impact on
both the high school and the university.
VanOverbeke begins his tale by placing both secondary and higher
education in the context of late-nineteenth-century America and the social
and economic changes then occurring. He notes that throughout much of
this period there was not a clear dividing line between the work of colleges
and secondary schools and both institutions competed with each other for
students. This was not a situation that could continue as university adminis-
trators and faculty spoke increasingly of the unique role that higher e ducation
was coming to play in credentialing the nation’s youth for middle-class life.
Beginning with Angell’s efforts in Michigan to develop a system for
inspecting and accrediting high schools, the volume explores the expan-
sion of this system of accreditation to the Midwest, New England, and the
South. In discussing the diffusion of the idea of accreditation across the
nation, VanOverbeke points to the regional differences that affected what
was becoming throughout the nation a hierarchical system of education.
These developments had not only regional but national manifestations,
and he includes a discussion of the relationships between these two spheres
of activity.
The volume pays particular attention to the place of the high school in
these developments. Here, VanOverbeke focuses his attention on the role
of the National Education Association’s Committee of Ten on Secondary
School Studies under Eliot’s leadership. The work of this committee, he
argues, served to strike a balance between the interests of higher and sec-
ondary education. It defined the four-year high school course of study as
the standard preparation for admission to college, while at the same time
promoting a degree of flexibility into its course of study that made room in
the university for the modern subjects that were coming to dominate the
high school’s curriculum. Overall, the book considers how and why during
the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries two separate educational
institutions were able to develop a means of linking their work to create by
the turn of the century an American system of education.
Series Editors’ Preface xi
The Standardization of American Schooling emphasizes in a more defin-
itive way than other previous volumes in this series the connection between
secondary education and other educational institutions, in this case the
university. As the series develops, we as series editors hope to highlight an
array of such linkages and in so doing situate secondary education in the
broader context in which it exists.
Barry M. Franklin and Gary McCulloch
Series Editors
Note
1. Emile Durkheim, The Evolution of Educational Thought: Lectures on the
Formation and Development of Secondary Education in France, trans. Peter
Collins (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1977), 8, 10.